Essays: The First Days of Representative Tim Walz

Until last spring, Tim Walz was a high school teacher and football coach from southern Minnesota. He had no political experience whatsoever, but he didn’t like the choices being made on Capitol Hill, and struggled to explain them to his social studies students.

So Walz made a decision: He would run for Congress as a Democrat. On the cam paign trail, the barrel-chested former National Guardsman called for a new approach to the war in Iraq and sharply criticized the No Child Left Behind Act, calling it a “bureaucratic nightmare.”